OCZ RevoDrive X2 Review: Killer SSD Performance

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Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, Vantage, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

For our first set of tests, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below. We have also included SANDRA's detailed graph so you are able to see how the drive performs over time along with the average rated result.

SANDRA Read/Write Performance - OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB

SANDRA offers our first sign of dominance here for the OCZ RevoDrive X2. The RD X2 puts up slightly better performance than its close relative, the OCZ IBIS drive. Essentially, the RevoDrive X2 and IBIS drive are very similar in their design (both incorporate the same Silicon Image RAID controller), with the exception of IBIS' extra layer of HSDL logic to interface to its X8 adapter card. Further, the RevoDrive X2 also keeps pace with the Fusion-io ioXtreme PCIe card, in terms of its read performance but absolutely smokes it according to SANDRA's write test, more than doubling the expensive ioXtreme's write throughput.